Wednesday, March 18, 2009

An Experiment in Pair Programming

I decided to run an experiment at work to block out an hour a day and publish a request for anyone to pair program with me during that hour. The environment that I work in is not very progressive in terms of TDD (Test Driven Development) and XP (Extreme Programming). In other words people are set in their ways a bit and not very aggressive in terms of learning new ways of doing things in my view. I thought it would be a good idea to share some things I have learned with my co-workers and what better way than to pair program.

The purpose of this Blog post is to catalog my experiences during this experiment. To be honest I have not ever worked in an XP environment, so this process is a bit new to me also.

Day 1

On the first day I had three people show up to pair with me. I had only asked for one person and that it was first come first serve, but I am not going to turn people away, so what we did was we discussed the project that I was working on and we walked through the code a bit.

I thought this went well; however it made me think that what I should do in the future is post a wiki entry that would explain what we would be working on that day. This way people had the opportunity to come prepared to write code. As I move through this experiment I am sure I will learn a ton.

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